Emancipation Proclamation

ARTICLES ABOUT EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION BY DATE - PAGE 2

It's a 137-year-old holiday yet most people in South Florida don't have the slightest idea that Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery. A number of states, including Florida, officially observe it, though not as a state holiday. Congress recognized Juneteenth Independence Day in 1997, and now there is a push to make it a national holiday. Locally, however, those who celebrate say they are getting a lukewarm reception. The reason appears to be the diverse cultural background of South Florida's black community, which is increasingly becoming home to immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and other West Indian countries.

When I first heard that there was an effort to make reparations to descendants of slaves, I thought it was so unreasonable it was nothing to be concerned about. But it is not. A bill, HR 3745, has been introduced in Congress, which asks for $8 million to pay to study the effects of slavery on black Americans and determine the amount of money needed to pay for the reparations. Slavery is wrong, but we cannot pay the people who were slaves. People living in America today were never slave owners nor were the blacks ever slaves.

Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, 1861-65. William K. Klingman. Viking, $25.95. 300 pp. It is perhaps the greatest testament to Abraham Lincoln's political skills that 138 years after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Americans are still arguing over just how he felt about slavery. Some point to his repeated statements that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed prior to secession as proof that he was not committed to destroying the institution that tore the nation apart in 1861.

Years before he took an African name, a little boy in Texas knew Juneteenth as a day at the zoo with his mom, his brother, and a picnic of fried chicken and strawberry soda. On a trip back to Fort Worth last week, Kwame K. Afoh, 57, took his own little boy to visit that zoo. Afoh happened to be wearing a T-shirt from a Juneteenth celebration in Fort Lauderdale last year. "What's Juneteenth?" a mom trailed by a couple kids wanted to know. Afoh told the family, visitors from Arizona, the Texas origins of the holiday that in recent years has spread across the union.

February is Black History Month, a time to remember the achievements and struggles of blacks. A funny thing, though: The man who started the tradition in the 1920s didn't think it would last. He didn't want it to last. Some day, he thought, blacks and their history would enter the American mainstream. A special day, week or month to tell their stories and study their past simply wouldn't be necessary. Historian Carter G. Woodson was born to former slaves and grew up poor, working at one point in a coal mine.

Today is Juneteenth -- the only day that recognizes the emancipation of black American slaves, a day that gets "wide-eyed expressions" from people when Donald Gibson talks about it. This is the second year that Gibson's nonprofit development organization, Community Resource Center in West Palm Beach, is sponsoring a Juneteenth celebration. When he's passing out fliers, he said, the subject gets a typical response. "People would say, `What is Juneteenth?'" Juneteenth officially commemorates the day -- June 19, 1865 -- when blacks in Texas were officially told they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

Juneteenth is the original African-American holiday. Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery, the central event in African-American history. There are several stories of how the celebration started. One version of Juneteenth says the holiday commemorates the day slaves first heard the Emancipation Proclamation in Houston, Texas, on June 19, 1863 _ five months after Lincoln first issued it. Supposedly, African-Americans coined the word "Juneteenth" to commemorate the June 19 freedom day. Another version has Union Gen. Gordon Granger, commander in charge of Texas, landing in Galveston on June 19, 1865.

Bill Clinton has earned a boat-load of scorn since suggesting that he might apologize for slavery, as some in Congress have suggested. Critics from both left and right argue that such an apology would be trivializing, empty, arrogant and racially divisive. The dominant view, typified by the columnist Charles Krauthammer, is that there is essentially nothing to discuss, since the Civil War closed the issue and the slavers and the enslaved are long since dead. But all the noise suggests the issue is very much alive.

FORT LAUDERDALE -- A choir and special sermon will be featured during an Emancipation Proclamation celebration at 10 a.m. Friday at Mount Bethel Baptist Church, 901 NW 11th Ave. The proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln to free slaves and became effective on Jan. 1, 1863. This year`s celebration service is the first public event sponsored by the African-American Ecumenical Ministerial Fellowship of Broward County. The group is Broward`s only ecumenical fellowship for black ministers.

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of those government documents full of legalese, almost to the point of being incomprehensible. At Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale, they celebrated the words anyway on Wednesday. For all its shortcomings, the proclamation symbolizes the struggles that ultimately ended slavery in the United States. Wednesday`s service, the first of its kind in the county, was designed to shed light on a document too often forgotten, said the Rev. Clarence E. Glover, Mount Bethel`s pastor.